International Biometric Society

Quantum Pattern Recognition of Mitochondrial DNA sequences N. O. Barros1 Patr cia Silva Nascimento Barros1 , Wilson Rosa de Oliveira1 , Kleber Napoleao 2 and Aden lton Silva Universidade Federal Rural de Pernambuco, Departmento de Estat stica e Informatica, Pos em Biometria e Estat Graduac ao stica Aplicada, Recife, PE CEP 52171-900, Brazil 2 Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Centro de Informatica, Recife, PE - Brazil Nucleotides are molecules that, when joined together, constitute the structural units of RNA and DNA. There are four nucleotide bases of a DNA strand - adenine, cytosine, guanine, thymine represented by the letter A, C, G and T. They are pairwise complementary (A to T, C to G). Mitochondrion is a cytoplasmic (outside the nucleus) membrane-enclosed organelle sometimes described as cellular power plants because they generate most of the cells supply of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), used as a source of chemical energy. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is the DNA located in the mitochondria. The mtDNA carries different genetic information from that found in nuclear DNA. Each mitochondrion has 2 to 10 copies of mtDNA which in turn has about 16,000 pairs of nucleotide basis, varying its numbers with the species. Because mtDNA is not highly conserved and has a rapid mutation rate, it is useful for studying the evolutionary relationships - phylogeny - of organisms. Biologists can determine and then compare mtDNA sequences among different species and use the comparisons to build an evolutionary tree for the species examined. Because mtDNA is transmitted from mother to child (both male and female), it can be a useful tool in genealogical research into a persons maternal line. Taxonomic closer species have similar patterns in their DNA sequence. This work analyses the 15,000 rsts nucleotides of mtDNA from 16 animals species (mammals, birds, crustaceans, molluscs and shes) obtained from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). It is employed the Boltzmann distribution derived from a quantum associative memory proposed by Carlo A. Trugenberger, which gives the probability that a given input pattern x is a stored pattern pk , for each k = 1, m: Pb (pk ) where 1 cos2b dH (i, pk ) , Z 2n p Z = dH (i, pk ) . cos2b 2n k=1 =
1

This probabilities uses the Hamming distance dH (x, y ). The amplitudes are peaked on those stored patterns which are closest in Hamming distance to the input, resulting in a high probability of measuring a memory pattern very similar to it. The accuracy of pattern recognition can be tuned by adjusting a parameter b playing the role of an effective temperature. The DNA sequences were transformed in binary numbers substituting A and G for 1 and C and T for 0. The results show that this probability is very efcient to recognise the nucleotides patterns from the mtDNA of the species investigated. The algorithm is not computationally efcient in a classical computer but it is extremely efcient in a quantum computer.

International Biometric Conference, Floripa, Brazil, 5-10 December 2010